


damn sure better than rain.

by cp035



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Seperations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 23:16:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1567577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cp035/pseuds/cp035
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meryl, Charlie, and moving on.  The Olympic Gold medal should have been enough already.</p>
            </blockquote>





	damn sure better than rain.

**Author's Note:**

> This is...a weird fic. I just kinda hammered it out and I know I promised someone a Maks/Meryl fic in the comments of my last story post- but that's still in progress and I thought I would post this one first. It's kind of dark...but I tried to give everyone (even guest star Tanith) a good "happy ending" within the context of what happens in here. No one dies and it isn't a violent thing, just in case you're worried. 
> 
> Pure fiction, because I really don't want this to happen, but I hope you guys enjoy it anyway!

Meryl had been the one who wanted to try for another world title.

 

They still had it in them, she had reasoned.

 

He had won their season on Dancing With the Stars ( _being Charlie's runner-up wasn't as bad as she'd thought it would be_ ), and riding off that success, the Stars on Ice tour had scored sellouts in city after city.

 

The crowd _loved_ them.

 

Wouldn't it be nice, to give back a _victory_ to that crowd?

 

The Olympics had been just _theirs_ ,  but one final year, one last world title, she told him, for their friends, their families, and everyone who had been there every step of the way.

 

It would be their Thank You (not _just_ to Mom) year.

 

Charlie told the reporter from Ice Network that it was their _Victory Lap_. Had they gotten cocky, with nothing to lose in the past year of their lives? Maybe. It was a question whose answer would haunt Meryl for months afterwards.

 

She should have _known._

 

Instead, she held Charlie's hand like always, while the networks announced their comeback season, and threw herself into their practices. He was breathless beside her at Nationals. She collapsed into him at the Grand Prix Final. At Four Continents, they tangled into each other at center ice. It didn't matter who saw anymore.

 

It was finally _their_ time.

 

The Canton rink went wild, and even the Shibutani kids, heavy favorites for the title ( _finally!_ ), moved aside and counted their days until Pyeongchang. It would be better, said Alex, to go into the Olympic season as underdogs then win a world title, and medal at the Olympics. Maia brought them coffee and would sneak candy and treats into their lockers. It was _fine,_ they both said, _Go_.  They would take that bronze ( _maybe_ silver) graciously, and for that, Meryl and Charlie were grateful.

 

Tessa and Scott had retired. The Russian bronze-medalists they remembered from Sochi were broken up and expected to finish in the mix of the top 10 with their new partners.

 

Charlie would look at her with a wildness in his eyes, telling her it could be their year, all over _again_.

 

Then it would be time to let it go, and leave the ice for Alex and Maia. Gold was a beautiful color on them both.

 

But _only_ after they won that one last title.

 

They were first after the Short Dance. Just as everyone expected, but the crowd didn't seem to mind. The judges were smiling, sipping from water bottles, and Marina, dressed in her best purple frock by the boards, held on to their skate guards as they took the ice. Charlie found their parents in the crowd, cheering just like it was their very first competition.

 

_One more time._

 

Meryl looked _beautiful_.

 

Charlie's golden hair whipped up as they spun into the first twizzle sequence. Her finger and thumb hung between her blade and boot, nails painted an exquisite shade of blue- the color of the sky at midnight in the springtime.

 

Charlie was pulling her back, their hands linked, that same pure love and admiration in his eyes. She felt him pushing it, harder and harder, his legs pumping on the ice while he lifted her higher and higher, and she twisted, arced across his back. Meryl's eyes had fluttered closed, and she could barely hear the music over the roaring in her ears.

 

 _Yes_ , it was their year again.

 

Until she felt the ice rushing up to greet her, and suddenly, her eyes snapped open. She heard a sharp crack, and felt a flash of pain that was quickly numbed by cool, solid, ice.

 

He dropped her.

 

Of _all_ the places, at the World Championships of their comeback season. So there would be no _one more title_. But they could still be _triumphant,_ couldn't they? Meryl's eyes flashed up, expecting to see Charlie's hand hovering over her, ready to pull her back up and resume their program as the music began to swell to a climax. Everything still felt _fine_.

 

She felt an ache spreading in her shoulder, but it wasn't more than a bad bruising.

 

Adrenaline, and the total absence of self-doubt, she would learn, made people do funny _stupid_ things.

 

She pushed herself up off the ice, deaf to the worried murmur that was rising through what should have been their crowd. It wasn't until she shook her head, dazed, the lights of the arena far too bright  for a moment like this, that she finally saw him. Charlie was on his knees, like they were ending that Olympic-winning Scherazade program, but something was _wrong._

 

He was in pain, _wasn't he_? She was trying to get to him, but there was someone holding her back, in a bright blue jacket, with a little ISU patch on the chest.

 

He was telling her not to move so much, and she remembered trying to fight him on it, before she saw Jacqui at the boards with Marina, her fire-engine red lips mouthing _disaster._

 

So, that was how it ended. Almost twenty years later, they _shattered._

 

* * *

 

 

After that, she remembered hospitals and doctors, her parents, his parents, a flurry of press conferences where they had turned off her microphone early, and she would find herself ushered off the stage just as she was about to speak. Charlie had snapped something in his back, apparently, something she could never remember though she had spent hours looking things up on the internet, screaming at doctors and insurance agents until Cheryl had taken her phone and locked it in the hotel safe, leaving Meryl alone in the dead quiet of their hotel room in Germany, the TV turned up to deafening on a German talk show she didn't understand.

 

Guilt, she found, was almost like grief, and it could be dealt with in much the same way. After she and Charlie came home, to the Shibutani kids' somber faces and Marina's regrets murmured in Russian while she slept in the window seat of the plane, Meryl spent a week in her childhood bedroom, crying so hard that eventually, even her father caved and held her like a little girl until she no longer sobbed as much as whimpered.

 

He told her they would take the boat out on the lake, the very next day, and she felt an entirely different wind sift through her hair. It was warm, and wet.

 

Charlie would get better, and they would both be _fine._

 

Back in Michigan, winter ran into spring, and by early April, it was cold and cloudy, the skyline finally a bleak match to the failing economy and crumbling Detroit outskirts. The news told her it would only get _better_ from here.

 

It hadn't.

 

_It didn't._

 

Meryl was the one who gave their statement, to Tanith, in the parlor of her duplex in Plymouth, the walls bare and baby blue.

 

_Accidents happened. Injuries happened._

 

They were keeping their sense of humor about it.

 

There were a few more embarrassing things than what had happened at Worlds.

 

At least they would really have no excuse but to finish grad school now.

 

_It was totally kicking their butts!_

When Tanith asked _what their futures would hold now_ , her voice was cagey and harsh.

 

Charlie was struggling. That was the nice, politically correct byline that the other reporters had gone with, a quote polished by their agents and printed with Meryl's name beside it. It wasn't like he was paralyzed or anything like that, but it was simple truth he would never skate again, and things had never been quite right since they came home. _Charlie_ seemed to be drifting in _sadness_ no one really knew how to cure. The truth was, he was in pain, and he was angry and Meryl knew the bulk of that anger; all the disappointments they collected between the hospital hallway and the baggage claim, he took out on Tanith, nothing more than an innocent bystander in the mess _she_ had made.

 

Tanith knew, of course, that her boyfriend would have been whole and _still perfect_ , if his partner hadn't been so intent on glory that was more hers than theirs. For her sake, Meryl looked down into her lap and lied. She heard Charlie was planning to propose. He'd bought the most beautiful ring and would make such a _wonderful_ father. His girlfriend was so _beautiful_ and Meryl, well she herself was wholly focused on school.

 

_Guys could totally wait!_

 

Maybe it wasn't a lie. She'd let go of Charlie somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and now she only wished he could be _happy_.

 

The sports psychologist wrote prescriptions, Tanith dutifully curled her hair and wore bright summer dresses, in the middle of a soaking wet spring; the way he loved her the most. Meryl was a constant, relieved only by Jacqui by his side. If it had been anyone else, Meryl would have said it was admirable, how they all came together just for _him._

 

Charlie was _special._ The psychologist told her that maybe just being there was the best they could do, and Tanith was cracking.

 

When the interview finished, Tanith excused herself to go to the bathroom, and Meryl ran her blender with the last of her protein shake mix to block out the sounds of her crying.

 

She was gone less than three weeks later, to a new apartment in New York City and a job doing commentary for the NBC Sports network. Meryl's brother would see her on football games and loudly tell his friends that he _totally knew that hot chick_ they all loved until she would scream at him to _just shut up_.  Months later, Tanith would leave her a long, hesitant voicemail.

 

The gist of it was _Thank You._

 

There was a bottle of vodka, a gift from Marina, and a shot glass from Japan, from the Shibutanis. Each drink, she would ask herself, _Thank you for what?_

 

_Giving someone else a reason to abandon him?_

 

They were trying everything, between the countless therapy appointments and different doctors and exhausted insurance policies, and the way he just looked at her now, tired and still lost, she wondered often if it was worth it. He would only giver her a smile and a pained shrug, take his pills and get on with his day. Maybe that was all they could do.

 

Meryl had convinced Charlie to apply to law school, just like he had dreamed, and she had told him they would do it _together._

 

She had announced to her father that she had every intention of taking over his role in the family firm once she graduated, and anyone who dared ask her if she was sure was immediately shut out of her life, like her brother; who had the audacity to suggest that maybe this wasn't a decision she was making for _herself._

 

 _So what_ if it wasn't? There were travel brochures piled high on her bedside table, and the world map on her wall that was rolled into a dark corner of her closet. Meryl had always wanted to see the world, to be a part of it and help change it for the better, but she never once allowed the deep sense of regret which haunted her at night to take root.

 

Ann Arbor sprung around it a beautiful world of it's own, and things got _better._

 

Charlie took her out for dinner and she wondered about those lies she had told Tanith.

 

But then, quickly as a new summer, things turned around.

 

Charlie was drowning again, and she was pulling him to shore. At first, it was easy; cook his dinner while he would sit in bed, watching the sun start to set in the window of the bedroom they shamelessly shared in their apartment. Do his papers, sometimes. Let him cry.

 

_Cry, and cry, and cry._

 

Charlie was mostly okay, though. _Better sometimes_ , according to Jacqui, at least.

 

And Meryl?

 

She was tired.

 

So, so, _tired._

 

One crisp, summer afternoon, they sat outside that physiotherapy office and fixed her with a look of regret, so wholly unfamiliar that she mistaked it for pain, and reached into the center console of his car for those pills. Charlie's smile was as wide as the always she remembered, his eyes still shining with promise that she knew she was imagining.

 

He asked her not to come in with him, and just like that, undocked his ship from the harbor and sailed away into the ocean alone.

 

Davis and White.

_The End._

 

Things moved quickly after that.

 

* * *

 

 

Within a month, she had transferred from the Michigan Faculty of Law to the UCLA Faculty, and fell in love with the Boardwalk and felt the sand between her toes; along with the same warm, wet, breeze that told her things would finally begin to get _better._ She and Josh began as a one night stand, and then she fell in love with him, too.

 

Josh was warm, comforting, and he wanted a family. He graduated at the top of their class, and being _his_ runner up wasn't as bad as she thought it would be. He had lovely parents, and a beautiful house that would be theirs when they wanted, beside the Atlantic Ocean all the way across the country, in a good liberal state where they would love to raise their children.

 

Best of all, Josh didn't ask _once_ about Charlie. He hadn't been born yesterday, of course, but he took to heart the understanding that the parts of her life which included Charlie were over. They were finished and _painful_ and she deeply regretted how they had ended. Still, for what she had _done_ to him, she deserved to have him missing from her visits back to Michigan, absent from the wedding she and Josh had in the Dominican (when all of their old skating friends- _even Tessa_ , showed up to celebrate), like a void in the back of the pictures at their daughter's first birthday, her parents' fiftieth anniversary, and their housewarming party.

 

The life Meryl imagined had always included Charlie, and sometimes Josh would indulge the fantasy. He told her Charlie was with a law firm in Chicago, and when Josh  said his name, she felt something burn through her.

 

Their daughter had learned that lesson when she put her hand on the hot stove.

 

_Don't touch things that hurt you._

 

_Keep them far, far, away._

 

Still, for her, the ice felt more like home than ever- alone this time, tracing the crease around the hockey nets and big blue line at center ice instead of depending on Charlie as her guide. It was different. Challenging, exhilarating, and wonderful. Meryl embraced the role of skating mom wholeheartedly, until one of the coaches had pulled her aside to tell her their daughter had _all the makings of a future ice dancer, and wouldn't they like to take her to a tryout with a boy the next town over?_

 

She looked him straight in the face and told him they, as a family, were not interested in that sort of thing. It was a _whore_ of a sport. If Grace couldn't cut it as a singles skater, then that was okay, they'd find _something else._

 

She turned out to be a great gymnast, after all, one who always looked at those ice dancers on the Olympic broadcasts like heroes. Apparently, it was just so _perfect_ and _romantic_ , and Meryl thought she was going to gag. It was like she was one of their clients in the criminal court,  being told her request for parole on the ground of good behavior and doing _everything_ she could to move on had been _denied_ , and the judge would see those consecutive life terms _all_ served out.

 

She gave her gold medal to Grace, and told her how it _wrecked_ her life and no one was really as happy as they looked on TV.

 

She was _ecstatic_ to get it out of their bottom drawer.

 

Guilt was like grief, and she _still_ wasn't over it.

 

* * *

 

 

For his credit, Charlie did not tell his wife who Tanith was when they ran into each other in New Jersey, while he was at a conference turned family vacation.

 

He had married Vera, from the drop-in Homeowner's Law class, ditzy and vacant and lovely and kind and beautiful as they came.

 

If Tanith knew he had _settled,_ she didn't let on, and instead, their blond-haired children played freeze tag on the playground while they talked, just like they had _always_ imagined.

 

It had taken a while after Meryl left ( _he debated for years whether or not he had_ really _given her his blessing in that parking lot_ ), but life was bright again, and he hated that he had missed seeing it, vivid and pulsing, for so many years.

  

Without her there, he had stopped taking his mother's calls, stopped watching football games where Tanith's voice, joyless and shrill, would tell him that the Wolverines had scored _another touchdown_. So life was black, and bleak, and frankly _fucking terrible_ , but he found that rain was nice, failing a class was not all that bad, and there were people like Vera, who had not felt so much pain in their lives as a papercut, which gave him a terrible amount of _hope._

 

It had just taken some _time_ , which no one else in the world had.

 

Still, things never did get _better._  

 

Instead, they became okay again, and suddenly, he was a lawyer, and getting married, and having a son and moving to Chicago. He was winning his cases and buying a house, and taking his son to hockey, and feeling prouder than life itself when Mason and his partner, Noelle made it all the way to the Juvenile National Championships and came home with a gold medal in Ice Dancing. 

 

Sometimes bad things happened to the wrong people. But he was nothing if not a _fighter_ , and there was so much _good_ left in the world.

 

That made Charlie really, really, _happy_. 

 

* * *

 

 

Meryl and Charlie would not meet again for years, and when they did, she was dressed in a sharp business suit, with a skirt far too short for the courtroom, yet perfect for a day of gauging the new firm's crop of possible junior partners. She had done as she promised, and took over the old Davis firm under she and Josh's name, moving back to the city where she had grown up, with two little girls singing along with the radio as they drove north.

 

He had seen their offer posted online, and thought it absolutely perfect. His parents were getting older, and it seemed time to move back. There was enough of the world he had seen to be content with coming home. So he sent his resume, and set up his interview with Josh, half of the firm's husband and wife team. He seemed focused, professional, but most of all, filled with a contagious kind of enthusiasm for what they were bringing to the table.

 

Josh promised they were _different_ , and Charlie heard the giggles of small children in the background of their call.

 

Meryl's folder read _Attn. C. A. White_ , a graduate of the Michigan Faculty of Law, a hometown boy who had worked in Chicago with a high success rate and a particular interest in family law cases, pro bono.

 

_Interesting._

 

She had been rushing to get the girls to their new school, and had barely skimmed through his information. She thought he would be good, at least as an anchor to this place, which had changed so much since she had left. 

 

She felt something stir inside, which she recognized to be  a good feeling about this attorney. He would likely be a shoo-in, a quick interview and a wonderful partner at the firm.

 

The moment she saw him, dressed in khakis and a sports jacket, blue eyes shining with steel rather than the sweetness she remembered, Meryl _knew._

 

They'd grown up ten minutes apart.

 

Skated together for almost twenty years.

 

" _Hi._ ", said Charlie.

 

" _Hi._ ", said Meryl.

 

A tiny smile tweaked her lips, and he held out his hand to shake hers.

 

If there was supposed to be a spark, some kind of recognition or acknowledgement that they would have died for each other in a previous lifetime, it never came, and that was how their story ended, on a park bench in Ann Arbor, a warm spring breeze tousling her hair, the sun shining bright over a glistening lake.

 

There was not a sliver of ice to be seen.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know if it's possible to really seperate yourself that much from someone else given social media and the internet, but at the same time, I really wanted isolation to be part of this story and I hope it wasn't all too glaringly unrealistic.


End file.
